According to a report by OpenView Partners, companies using a PLG strategy grow 30% faster than those that don’t. This approach focuses on delivering an exceptional product experience, allowing the product to sell itself without heavy investment in sales or marketing.

To successfully implement and scale a product-led growth strategy, utilizing the right tools is essential. These tools help streamline onboarding, enhance user experience, and provide valuable insights into user behavior.

TL;DR

For a successful product-led growth strategy, use these tools to create a seamless and enjoyable user experience.

Must-use Tools for Product-led Growth:

1. Faqprime
   • Purpose: Creates comprehensive onboarding experiences and a detailed knowledge base.
   • Features: SEO-ready knowledge base, in-app tours, surveys and feedback, and effective pop-ups.
2. UserGuiding
   • Purpose: Guides users on how to use a product with cost-effective interactive in-app experiences.
   • Features: Various UI patterns like checklists, hotspots, tooltips, and modals.
3. Pendo
   • Purpose: Provide insights into user behavior and effective onboarding to facilitate quick product adoption.
   • Features: Auto-generated guides, flow triggers, and product analytics.
4. ProductPlan
   • Purpose: Outlines the vision, direction, priorities, and progress of product development.
   • Features: Flexible layouts for creating and sharing product roadmaps, and planning tools.
5. Mixpanel
   • Purpose: Offers real-time data and user tracking for engagement and retention.
   • Features: Builds funnels for user conversion and tracks key metrics and user activities.
6. Tableau
   • Purpose: Analyzes data and provides business intelligence to identify growth patterns.
   • Features: Connects product data, builds interactive dashboards, and performs statistical analyses.
7. Social Intents
   • Purpose: Facilitates customer communication across multiple platforms for an improved experience.
   • Features: Customizable chat widgets, pre-written replies, and chatbot setup.
8. Appcues
   • Purpose: Creates personalized onboarding experiences without coding.
   • Features: Intuitive UI, easy product tour creation, and user engagement tracking.
9. ChartMogul
   • Purpose: Measures and understands business revenue for improvement.
   • Features: Tracks subscription metrics, integrates payment data, and segments user data.
10. Baremetrics
    • Purpose: Analyze product performance to identify key improvement areas.
    • Features: Tracks SaaS metrics, forecasts cash flow, and measures progress against competitors.
11. CloudTalk
    • Purpose: Enhances customer communication via calls, integrated with tools like Hubspot and Salesforce.
    • Features: Advanced voice features, call routing, and CRM integrations.
12. UserFlow
    • Purpose: Onboard new users with guides, checklists, and surveys for quicker adoption.
    • Features: Integrates with web apps, has a resource center, and is user-friendly for non-technical teams.
13. Refiner
    • Purpose: Collect customer feedback to improve satisfaction.
    • Features: Sends in-app micro surveys, shareable surveys, and survey analytics.
14. Hotjar Recordings
    • Purpose: Analyze user behavior on websites to identify improvement areas.
    • Features: Spots problems, understands browsing behavior, and shares key recordings.
15. Segment
    • Purpose: Coordinates customer data across platforms, improving satisfaction and loyalty.
    • Features: Collects and combines product data, shares data with teams, and supports data-driven decisions.

15 Must-use Product-led Growth Tools in SaaS

Product-led growth (PLG) is an effective strategy for growing your business by leveraging your product as the primary driver of customer acquisition, expansion, and retention. 

Below is a list of 15 must-use PLG tools that can help you achieve your growth goals.

1. Faqprime

Faqprime is a complete tool for user onboarding. With it, you can improve how customers use your product. To guide them to value faster. By offering them personalized onboarding tours, checklists, in-app contextual help, pop-ups, NPS, surveys & feedback, and a detailed knowledge base. Flocareer uses Faqprime to create onboarding experiences for customers. 

Features:

1. Create a detailed knowledge base

With Faqprime’s knowledge base, users will never get lost when using your product. You can create a beautifully designed, SEO-ready knowledge base to match your brand by using a custom domain. 

2. Create NPS, surveys & feedback

With Faqprime, you can offer users a great product experience so they don’t quit using your product. You can send in-app surveys, feedback, and NPS to your users when they’re actively using the product and gather valuable insights. 

3. Pop-ups

Use Faqprime to increase the chances of first-time users being active, with walkthroughs, changelog, notifications, and prompts to introduce users to new product features.

2. Pendo 

The Pendo platform helps businesses understand their customers and, in turn, helps them improve how users interact with their digital products. Users will adopt your applications easily if you use Pendo for detailed and efficient onboarding. AccuWeather uses Pendo to share useful information globally, enhancing user engagement.

Features:

1. Auto-generated Guides: Use AI to generate in-app product tours based on your specifications.
2. Flow Triggers: Set conditions for triggering onboarding flows, such as user interactions or specific URLs.
3. Product Analytics: Collect and visualize product usage data with customizable dashboards.

Implementation Tips:

• Customization: Tailor guides to different user segments for a personalized experience.
• Data Integration: Integrate Pendo with your existing analytics tools for comprehensive insights.

3. Segment 

Segment is a free platform you can use to coordinate your customer’s data. It has all your product event data from different web and mobile apps in one platform. You can improve customer satisfaction and build customer loyalty, using data from your Segment account. Bonobos uses Segment to increase ad spend purchases. 

Features:

1. Data Collection: Aggregate product event data from web and mobile apps.
2. Data Sharing: Share data across teams in product, marketing, and engineering.
3. Data-driven Decisions: Make holistic, data-driven product decisions.

Implementation Tips:

• Unified Data: Ensure all data sources are connected to Segment for a complete customer view.
• Team Collaboration: Regularly share insights with cross-functional teams.

4. ProductPlan

ProductPlan is a product roadmap software, but it helps businesses craft product-led growth strategies for business growth. Grow your business by crafting useful strategies with ProductPlan. The UK government uses ProductPlan to understand how deliverables relate to big outcomes. 

Features:

1. Roadmaps: Use flexible layouts to create and visualize product roadmaps.
2. Sharing: Generate links to share roadmaps with stakeholders and export ideas to third-party platforms.
3. Planning Tools: Prioritize features, track progress, and set goals.

Implementation Tips:

• Strategic Planning: Use roadmaps to align your team on product strategy and goals.
• Stakeholder Engagement: Regularly update and share roadmaps with key stakeholders.

5. Mixpanel

Mixpanel is a free tool you can use as product analytics for tracking the performance of mobile and web applications. You can track your product’s performance for improvement with Mixpanel. Yelp uses Mixpanel to improve its products. 

Features:

1. CLV Tracking: Track key metrics like customer lifetime value and churn rate.
2. Click Activity: Measure user click activity to understand feature engagement.
3. Funnels: Build funnels to visualize user conversion paths.

Implementation Tips:

• Behavior Analysis: Regularly analyze click activity to identify and address user pain points.
• Conversion Optimization: Use funnels to improve user conversion rates.

6. Tableau

Tableau is part of the Salesforce set of tools businesses use for product growth. It is an enterprise business intelligence (BI) and analytics platform for visualizing and analyzing data. Nissan uses Tableau to grow their business. 

Features:

1. Data Integration: Import and connect data from multiple sources.
2. Trend Spotting: Build and share interactive dashboards to identify trends.
3. Statistical Analysis: Perform statistical analyses and forecast summaries.

Implementation Tips:

• Data Visualization: Use Tableau’s visual tools to present data insights clearly.
• Predictive Analytics: Leverage statistical analysis for forecasting business outcomes.

7. Social Intents 

Social Intents is a live chat tool that is usually useful for customer services. With it, you can improve your customer service. You get to chat with your website visitors using Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Webex, all for better communication and improved responsiveness to customers. 

Features:

1. Collaborative Support: Improve internal collaboration among support agents.
2. Customizable Chat Widgets: Brand your chat widgets to match your company’s style.
3. Efficient Service: Create pre-written replies and set up chatbots for efficient customer engagement.

Implementation Tips:

• Live Chat Optimization: Use pre-written replies for common questions to speed up response times.
• Bot Integration: Implement chatbots to handle basic inquiries and free up human agents.

8. Appcues 

Appcues are a tool for creating user onboarding without the need to code. It’s a preferred choice for non-technical teams to track and analyze product usage. Users adopt your product quickly and efficiently using Appcues for onboarding. Hotjar uses Appcues for in-app signings. 

Features:

1. Intuitive UI: Build in-app flows easily with a user-friendly interface.
2. Product Tours: Create product tours using a Chrome extension.
3. User Engagement Tracking: Track UI engagement with the Events Explorer.

Implementation Tips:

• Easy Onboarding: Start with simple product tours to guide new users.
• Engagement Monitoring: Use engagement data to refine onboarding experiences.

9. ChartMogul

ChartMogul is a free platform SaaS companies can use for subscription analytics. Chart Mogul is simple to use and free for new companies – only when they start earning $10K monthly recurring revenue. With ChartMogul you can improve your revenue, by analyzing key revenue metrics. 

Features:

1. SaaS Metrics: Track metrics like monthly recurring revenue and trial-to-paid conversion rate.
2. Payment Data Integration: Pull data from Stripe, PayPal, and other processors.
3. Data Segmentation: Segment data to identify profitable pricing plans and user profiles.

Implementation Tips:

• Revenue Tracking: Regularly monitor key SaaS metrics to track business health.
• Customer Segmentation: Use data segmentation to target high-value customer segments.

10. Baremetrics

Baremetrics is a premium subscription tool SaaS companies can use for product analytics. To get a complete overview of your business to see where you can make improvements, Baremetrics is a good choice. Hubstaff uses Baremetrics to grow their company. 

Features:

1. SaaS Metrics: Track metrics like MRR growth rate, expansion revenue, and reactivations.
2. Cash Flow Forecasting: Forecast monthly recurring revenue and customer numbers.
3. Competitor Comparison: Compare progress against similar companies and collect cancellation insights.

Implementation Tips:

• Forecasting: Use cash flow forecasts to plan for future growth.
• Churn Analysis: Analyze cancellation reasons to reduce churn rates.

11. CloudTalk

CloudTalk is a call center software. With it, you can engage with customers all over the world regardless of boundaries, without any hassles. CloudTalk is important for customer satisfaction. Nokia uses Cloudtalk to improve productivity for their support agent. 

Features:

1. Voice Features: Utilize call recording, toll-free numbers, and personalized greetings.
2. Call Routing: Route calls to the right agents based on skills and preferences.
3. CRM Integration: Connect with CRM tools to improve efficiency.

Implementation Tips:

• Efficient Routing: Set up call routing to ensure customers reach the right agent quickly.
• Personalized Service: Use personalized greetings to enhance customer experience.

12. User Flow

Userflow is important for improving your user onboarding experience. With it, you can build customized in-app tours, checklists, and surveys without coding or making an installation. Lead users to adopt your product quickly using UserFlow. Aaron Brothers, Inc., uses UserFlow for onboarding customers. 

Features:

1. Web App Integration: Integrate with other web apps for a smooth user journey.
2. Resource Center: Provide users with access to resources for success.
3. No-code Customization: Non-technical users can create engaging flows.

Implementation Tips:

• Custom Tours: Design custom onboarding tours to guide users effectively.
• Resource Accessibility: Ensure users can easily access help and resources.

13. Refiner

Refiner is a platform for getting customer feedback, using Refiner, businesses can understand and improve customer experience. Shine uses Refiner to create and Send customer surveys. 

Features:

1. In-app Micro Surveys: Collect real-time feedback from active users.
2. Shareable Surveys: Generate survey links to share via social media.
3. Survey Analytics: View analytics on survey responses and visualize trends.

Implementation Tips:

• Targeted Surveys: Use micro surveys to gather specific feedback from different user segments.
• Trend Analysis: Regularly analyze survey data to identify and act on trends.

14. Hotjar Recordings

Hotjar Recordings is a freemium product used for a user’s browser session recording. It collects the user’s browsing data like browsing behavior (including mouse movements) across multiple pages for the improvement of your product. Turum-burum used Hotjar Heatmaps, Recordings, and Surveys to improve Intertops conversion rates. 

Features: 

1. Spot problems

Using Hotjar recordings, you can spot problems like bugs, a user might encounter,  and their pain points. 

2. Understand your users’ browsing behavior

View browsing behavior from your active users to see why they are churning and, in simple terms, why they quit using your product. 

3. Share key recordings

You can share your key recordings to get approval for product updates from stakeholders. 

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What Are the Three Pillars of Product-led Growth?

A typical product-led growth strategy is based and built on three important factors: designing for the user, delivering value, and investing in the product’s growth and development with go-to-market intent.

2. How to measure the success of a product-led growth strategy?

To calculate a product’s growth rate percentage, divide the start by the end value, then multiply it by 100. 

(End value/starting value) x 100% = growth rate

The start value represents the value of your business when it started, while the end value represents the current value of your business. 

3. What Are the Product Development Steps?

The product development process is a six-step process where you take a product from initial concept to final market launch. These steps include: identifying users’ needs, researching the competition, creating a solution, developing a product roadmap, and building a minimum viable product (MVP).

4. How To Ensure Product Growth?

You can achieve product growth by making sure you implement a complete onboarding experience for users, lead users to activation as quickly as possible, and encourage user referrals.